The Collective
The Collective is the name of an organization with a major impact on the events of Doubt Academy 2 and 3. A large multinational organization with hundreds of years of history, in the context of the games it frequently interferes with the lives of the students, ostensibly for the good of humanity. With a focus on the advancement of technology, especially for medical uses, the Collective is willing to subject the students to potentially dangerous situations. As a result of this, they are a major antagonist in both rounds, and in fact several of its members were the ones who started Games of Mutual Killing. Background Its history prior to the events of Doubt Academy is not described in detail. To quote the Collective History book found in Gaia's library, "to fully explain the history of the Collective would take hours, if not weeks". The organization is described to have existed for hundreds of years and to have been responsible for many advancements in technology, medicine, ecology, and genetics. Many politicians and authority figures, if not whole political parties, are associated with the Collective, allowing them to influence events around the nation. In 2014, the Collective opened Bright Side Spa and Resort, a facility with two very different purposes. Half of the facility functioned as a place where guests could stay and relax, but in secret the other half worked on the Collective's research. It was there that the Test of Augmentation Project began, and with it the Backup Simulation Grid and the beginnings of the Unity Project. As the latter began to take shape, the Collective bought Magical Miracleworld, an amusement park that was developed and owned by Hope's Peak Academy. Presumably, somewhere around this time was when Kyoji Yasuda became an employee of the Collective. This gave them access to the students of the academy for the purpose of their projects. In fact, documents revealed that the students themselves were sold off to the Collective by Yasuda, with the class being misled on the true nature of what they were signing up for. A few students have themselves been hired by the Collective, but all known relationships with the organization have always ended in betrayal. The students of the 89th Class became the subjects of the Unity Project, which was intended to test both the ability to erase a subject's capability for violence and see how well they could work as a hivemind in conjunction with the Backup Simulation Grid. Unfortunately, not only did the chips fail to prevent the Game of Mutual Killing from taking hold in Magical Miracleworld, but Bright Side fell into the hands of Doctrina Artifice, and the game was started there as well. As more and more students of the split class began dying, the Collective began making preparations for their eventual escape. It cut off ties with its employee in Magical Miracleworld and wrote off Bright Side Spa and Resort as a complete loss, and they organized a party to receive the expected survivors of the amusement park. At the same time, they struggled with the threats of Doctrina Artifice and made plans to repurpose its research facility in Mt. Takao into a shelter. That shelter was planned to contain Kyoji Yasuda, the survivors of the 89th Class, and the entirety of the 91st Class. However, these plans were disrupted when Doctrina Artifice released a broadcast that revealed to the public the deaths of children in the park and the spa, pinning all of it on the Collective and encouraging the people to rise up and fight back. Hope's Peak Academy was attacked overnight, and the surviving students that were being temporarily kept there were able to escape in the chaos. The 91st Class was relocated to Arcadia as planned, led by Yasuda. Only a month after their arrival, two student employees rebelled against the Collective, killing several researchers, imprisoning Yasuda and one surviving researcher, and taking over Arcadia and its associated areas. Once more, the Collective lost control of one of its facilities while a Game of Mutual Killing unfolded between the students. Despite their efforts to restrict movement around the area, outsiders were able to enter and exit once a silo in Gaia was opened, and eventually the class escaped from Arcadia and into Tokyo. The Collective's current activities following this are unknown. Judging from the number of guards that nearly prevented escape into Tokyo, they still hold some amount of power in the nation. Employees Most of the people involved with the Collective are not known at all in Doubt Academy's story, and many are merely mentioned by name or job. It's been stated that there is a Board of Directors, led by a person named Yasuhiro Fujioka. In the context of the game, the most prominently-seen member is Kyoji Yasuda, the headmaster of Hope's Peak Academy during the time the 88th, 89th, and 91st Classes attended. After hearing of his results from the Developmental Analysis Project, the Collective hired him to aid them in their own projects. Yasuda signed over the entirety of the 89th Class to the Collective, letting them be split between Magical Miracleworld and Bright Side Spa and Resort. Even as the experiments went out of their control and Doctrina Artifice infiltrated one of their facilities, Yasuda was not particularly troubled by these developments and remained with contact with Fujioka. He was sent to greet the survivors of the 89th Class with the intention of grouping them with the 91st Class and leading them all to a shelter, but Doctrina Artifice made their move as this was in progress, leaving Yasuda in the care of only the younger class. Yasuda stayed in Arcadia until being imprisoned by the students on two separate occasions, ultimately being set free just before they escaped to Tokyo. Given the multiple incidents his students have caused, it's unknown what his current standing is with the Collective. The Collective has also hired several students as honorary or full employees; the known employees include Khadija Halabi, Yuuto Ikeda, and Wakana Fujiwara, all three of which acted as the Mastermind for their respective games. However, their relationships with the Collective were tenuous at best, and always ended with both parties turning on each other. Khadija, who had been sent to oversee the events in Magical Miracleworld, suffered serious injuries from being used as the sole test subject. Because of her failing health, the Collective took away her authority on the project, implanting the chips into the other students, and when the results were undesirable they completely cut ties with Khadija and left her to deal with the uncontrollable situation. After being found out by her classmates, she paid back the Collective by revealing details of the BSG and the cloning technology, encouraging the survivors to take the data backups of their friends, use it as evidence of the Collective's crimes, and potentially bring back the dead students. After her execution, it was decided to upload Khadija's data into the clone in the Cryogenic Lab so that she could continue to share her knowledge, but one of the survivors sabotaged the process and killed the clone. Her data was still retrieved along with the rest of her class's, leaving the possibility of her being brought back anyway should another vessel be found. After Doctrina Artifice went public with its accusations against the Collective, Yuuto (who had controlled some of the riots with lethal force) and Wakana (a former Doctrina Artifice member herself) realized both groups were corrupt and dangerous. Together, they decided to attack the Collective before they started their experiments up again, and do whatever they could to destroy all corrupt organizations from society. With aid from an unrelated student, they attacked the staff in Arcadia, killing most of the researchers and sparing only Yasuda and Takeshi, who were sealed in an underground prison. The pair began two separate Games of Mutual Killing, with very different results: Yuuto was executed early on after being falsely convicted of one classmate's murder, while Wakana lived to see her classmates pin her as one of the Masterminds. One final betrayal occurred between the two of them when Yuuto (having been forced to communicate through a robot body) sentenced Wakana to her execution. Despite all of this, they were included with the other deceased students when the data backups were uploaded into human clones, and they escaped Gaia with the rest of their class, cutting off all ties with their old lives and each other. The Collective's degree of power in society after being exposed is mixed; many of their members have been forced from their political positions, gutting the government of Japan in the process, but the Collective appears to still have a military presence, judging by how they controlled traffic to and from Tokyo. It's considered unwise to acknowledge your own affiliations with the Collective, as even suspected allies are subject to dismissal from their positions of authority, and potentially worse backlash from sympathizers of Doctrina Artifice. Takeshi was reluctant to reveal his ties even to his closest friends, only confessing them when he began fearing for his life. Disgusted with the death and suffering his employers caused, he took charge of the cloning process in Gaia before rejoining with his friends; his words during the ending of Doubt Academy 3 imply that he intends to take a more active role in rebelling against the Collective. Technology Even though the students have universally loathed the Collective for the things they did to them, they have benefitted from the resources provided to them, unwittingly, begrudgingly, and sometimes willingly and happily. The full extent of the Collective's intentions is unknown, but of the sample seen in the games, the Collective has made (or attempted to make) a multitude of tools to control actions, record human experiences, and even cheat death. The students of the 89th Class were implanted with chips associated with the Test of Augmentation (TA Project) and the Unity Project, with the intention of being able to erase the ability to take violent actions even in a high-stress environment, as well as to test possible applications of the Backup Simulation Grid (BSG). It's stated that the chips are implanted right into the brainstem of the subject, but has a higher risk of causing irreversible brain damage in older patients, making adolescents the ideal subject. Unfortunately, the chips did not work, and when subjected to the conditions of the Game of Mutual Killing, the students quickly fell apart and began to attack and kill each other, causing the Collective to write the whole thing off as a failure. The chips also recorded data about knowledge, memories, personality, appearance, mannerisms, and senses into the BSG, which itself had another side effect: If the test subject died and there was no vessel to upload the backed-up data into, the data would gain sapience and act as its own being, believing itself to be a ghost of the deceased – an Independent Program (IP). The IPs are restricted to being in the BSG, although they can also interfere with some electrical equipment and even communicate with living people through them, as seen in the UsamiQuest and Fantasy Massage Equipment in the amusement park and spa respectively. The concept of IPs was used intentionally in the research in Arcadia. A non-invasive version of the chips was used with a bracelet attached to the subject's ankle, with their data being saved in the virtual world of Elysium. If the subject died, they could continue to live on in safety in Elysium while a new body was prepared for them, with their experiences in Elysium being carried over to their new lives. In both cases, this creation of sentient data opens a groundbreaking possibility: Bringing the dead back to life. The creation of a new human body can take at least three months, but can be done with just a scrap of DNA, allowing even those who were utterly destroyed a chance at revival if just a hair or a blood stain remains. However, this is a delicate process that requires intimate knowledge of how to operate the equipment involved. In Arcadia, only six researchers knew how to do this, and five of them were killed during the takeover. The sole survivor, however, was able to take on this task with other people providing assistance and support. An alternative to waiting for a human body to be created would be to instantly upload into the body of a humanoid robot. It's unknown how long these take to develop, but Arcadia is known to have at least 50+ in reserve, with Monobear and Monomi being examples of this. They were apparently made for military purposes, giving the Collective soldiers with few weaknesses (high strength and resilience, immunity to disease and aging), and the ability to revive quickly without waiting for a human body. It's offered as a way to bring back the students who died in Gaia and Tartarus, but is unanimously rejected in favor of either human bodies or simply leaving the dead behind. Presumably, the empty robot shells remain in Arcadia. The spiritual and ethical implications of the IPs and the clones do not escape the students, and it can be a subject of debate during endgame when the class is faced with a dilemma concerning the IPs. An existential crisis is not an uncommon reaction to a deceased student realizing the true nature of their afterlife. Some students disassociate the IPs with their old selves entirely, saying that the real student has already died and moved on while the IP is just data able to impersonate them; the IPs generally react badly to the idea of being treated as objects, although a few actually want to have nothing to do with their old selves. Regardless of each individual students' beliefs, as a group the survivors have always managed to preserve the data of the IPs, and in Doubt Academy 3 events conspired to allow them to upload them into human clones. Category:Doubt Academy 2: Black Category:Doubt Academy 2: White Category:Doubt Academy 3: Alpha Category:Doubt Academy 3: Omega Category:The Collective __FORCETOC__